Camp Gagnon - Who ACTUALLY Rigged Society

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Today, we dive into the rise of America’s Robber Barons—the industrial titans who built enormous fortunes, controlled entire industries, and helped define the Gilded Age. From John D. Rockefeller���s Standard Oil empire and J.P. Morgan’s financial power to Jacob Astor, Leland Stanford, political corruption, labor strikes, and the scandals that followed, we explore how these men became some of the richest and most powerful figures in American history. We also look at how Ida Tarbell, Theodore Roosevelt, and Howard Taft fought back—and ask whether the Robber Barons ever really disappeared, or simply evolved. Welcome to History Camp! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: FreeCash and BlueChew -FreeCash is the #1 App to Get Paid for Games, Surveys, Apps & Tasks on FreeCash💰 Join Free and Start Earning When You Click The Following Link https://bit.ly/3R8vcAC -BlueChew delivers chewable tablets straight to your door. Use promo code GAGNON at checkout. Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 0:00 Miles In The TENT 1:20 Origin of Robber Barons 4:58 Jacob Astor + Black Friday 7:18 John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil 8:45 J.P. Morgan’s Empire 9:59 The Gilded Age 11:10 Leland Stanford + Crédit Mobilier Scandal 15:27 The Homestead Strike +The Pullman Strike 17:27 Ida Tarbell + Roosevelt Sues Robber Barons 19:31 Howard Taft Breaks Standard Oil 20:38 How Robber Baron’s Hide 24:08 Today’s Robber Barons 25:44 Where Are They Today? 27:05 Drop Your Thoughts! #RobberBarons #GildedAge #Rockefeller #JPMorgan #AmericanHistory #HistoryCamp Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One man secretly bailed out the entire United States government. Not a president, not Congress, but a private citizen with his own money. His name was J.P. Morgan. And in 1895, when America's gold reserves collapsed toward zero, the government didn't turn to Washington. They turned to him. And he wasn't alone. There was once a man who cornered the gold market and tried to own every dollar in America.

And a man who owned 90% of the oil in the country and got richer even after the government broke up his empire. a governor who was also the president of the railroad he was supposed to be regulating. America had two names for men like this. Captains of industry who built the modern world and, of course, robber barons, who stole it right out from under everyone else. And the thing is, these are the same guys. And today we're breaking down their entire journey, how the robber barons got set up in American history, and how they grew to have this insane amount of power and wealth.

And ultimately asking the question that never really gets answered. What happens when businessmen become more? more powerful than the government itself. Can they be stopped or do they just absorb the government? Well, today we're going to find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to history camp. What's up people and welcome back to history camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Wednesday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from all history from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here in this very tent is I try to figure out everything that's ever happened. And every day, new stuff keeps on

happening. So here I am. once again. And oh boy, do we have a fantastic episode for you? Now, before we begin, let me just point out that you might hear some audio disturbances. Outside our tent today, there is some construction happening. There's some deforestation going on in the forest. And so if you hear that, I apologize, we're going to do our best to cut it out. Also, before we go, I want to say thank you to you, dude, or woman, whoever you are, I want to say thanks for tuning in because every time you click on an episode or like or comment or interact with our content at all, you help keep the lights onto the tent. You keep my dreams alive and you keep the fire burning here.

at the campsite. I also want to give a big thanks to my pal, Christos Papadopados, for abandoning us once again. Instead, I'm here by my side as my friend Miles. How are you, pal? I'm doing great. Miles, we have a fantastic episode about a topic that you probably are going to like. Yeah. Robert Barrens. Yeah, I mean, the Carnegie's, the Rockefellers, the J.P. Morgan's. Yeah. I mean, maybe Robert Moses mentioned here and there. It's an awesome time in history to learn about. It is the best time in history of the best guys doing awesome stuff and nothing wrong. Nothing wrong at all. You're like a big capitalist, so you're probably, I love this stuff.

Yeah. Now, if you've never heard of this term, let me break it down. You may have heard the phrase, robber baron, right? And if you're like most people, you have like a vague picture. You're probably thinking of like The Monopoly Man or something. Right. It's like a rich guy, he's got a top hat. He's kind of, you know, doing some type of shady deal.

And that image is not wrong, but it's actually not where the phrase came from. Here's the actual story. And it starts all the way back in medieval Germany, not even in America. So let me take you to the Rhine River, all right? There were these like petty noblemen that were called the Rural. Roebritter. They're literally robber knights. That was like the translation. And their whole business was pretty simple. You would build a castle at a narrow point in the river, and then you charge a toll on every ship that tries to pass by. That's it. That's the whole operation.

And it's a pretty good business model because people got to go through. And, you know, people were annoyed because they didn't grow anything or mine anything. And they didn't build anything that anyone actually needed. They just kind of owned a choke point and forced people to pay. Now, as we go forward, keep that image in your pocket, right? The castle, the river, the toll, because we're going to come back to it a lot, and it's going to be very important to the story. So how does a story about a medieval German, like, river pirate, basically, end up describing American oil tycoons 600 years later? Well, because the first time anyone used the metaphor in American journalism, they almost meant the opposite of what it means today. So February 9th, 1859, and New York Times editor named Harry J. Raymond published an editorial with the headline

your money or your line. And he's comparing Cornelius Vanderbilt to those old, like, German River Toll guys. Now, if you know anything about Vanderbilt, your brain probably just filled in the rest of that sentence for you. Ruthless, monopolist, crushing the little guy, right? Well, kind of wrong. Vanderbilt at that moment was the little guy.

He was like the underdog. He was undercutting prices on a shipping route to California, a route that a government-favored company, Pacific Mail, considered its own private monopoly. So Raymond wasn't actually mad that Vanderbilt had too much power at that time. He was mad that Vanderbilt was competing too well. So the very first robber baron in American history was accused of being the one that was actually offering cheaper prices. That's almost the exact opposite of what the term means to us today, which means right off the bat, we kind of need to hold the label loosely because history didn't always agree on what this term meant, even at the moment that it was coined.

And the phrase didn't really explode until decades later when it first. finally did. It wasn't a journalist who made it permanent. It was actually a historian. So we got to go to 1934. You got this writer named Matthew Josephson, and he published a book called The Robber Barrens. And that book is the reason that you and I are using this phrase at all. And here's a thing worth knowing, before we even go further into this. Josephson wasn't writing a neutral history. He was writing in the middle of the Great Depression, a moment where the entire country was pissed at the concentration of wealth and ultimately looking for someone to blame. And his book was very pointed. And Essentially, if you read it, it's just like an indictment on the billionaire or the millionaire class of the time, which means the whole captains of industry versus the robber barons debate that we're going to walk through. Both sides have an agenda. And of course, they're extremely biased, you know, because who isn't? And they've been biased since the very first day. So I want to pose the question before we meet all these robber barons slash captains of industry. And I want you to think about it because we're going to keep on coming back to it. At what point does a man who owns like the river stop being a merchant and start becoming.

its own rival government. So we're going to meet the man who might actually be the first person in American history to actually fulfill that question. Hey guys, we're going to take a break real quick because this episode is sponsored by Brunt Workwear. I got the Marin Boot right here and what immediately stood out to me about this is the quality. They feel substantial. They are genuinely comfortable and just being honest, they are a really good looking boot. I like them. I wear them. This is even the pair that I wear. The pair that I wears at my house and they're absolutely dirty right now. But this gear is made for people working demanding jobs in like actual trades, but you don't have to work on a job site to recognize when something is built really well. And right now, Brunt is giving one lucky

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The sweepstakes ends September 18, 2026, and official rules apply. Go check out Brunt. Now let's get back to the show. So here are the guys who not only escalated the robber baron pattern, but also set the foundation for it. Like, they really created. So decades before the Gilded Age, there was a guy named John Jacob Astor. You're probably familiar with this guy. You've heard his name Miles.

If ever been on Astor Place in New York City? Astor Place. It's about him. So this guy, Astor, built a fur-trading empire. that was so dominant, it controlled the industry east of the Mississippi by 1816. And how did he do it? Well, it kind of depends on who you ask, but it seems like he exploited the native trading partners with a little bit of alcohol and stokes some violence between, you know, rival tribes over,

you know, fur trapping territory. There were no railroads at this point. There were no oil wars. It was just fur, okay? So just keep him in mind. Next, we have Cornelius Vanderbilt. And I'm sure you've heard his name. and a funny thing happened over the next few decades for Vanderbilt after being accused of making

his prices cheaper in that New York Times article. Vanderbilt went from being the underdog to being the king. He moved from steamboats into railroads and did the exact same trick everywhere that he went. He would undercut the competition on price until they either sell out or go broke. And then once he owns the entire route, he would raise the price back up. The disruptor then became the toll booth. And now here's where it gets fun, because now we have Jay Gould and, and James Fisk.

These two were not subtle businessmen. Together, they went to war with Vanderbilt over the control of the Erie Railway. This is the so-called Erie War, and their weapon of choice was basically fraud. They flooded the market with fake stock to dilute Vanderbilt's ownership, and then they would bribe judges and legislators to make the fraud retroactively legal. And then, in 1869, they tried their most audacious scheme yet. They tried to corner the entire U.S. gold market secretly by getting a relative of President Grant to influence federal gold sales from the inside. And it actually worked for a little bit, at least.

And then on September 24, 1869, the scheme falls apart. The date goes down in history as Black Friday. A national financial panic, investors wiped out overnight. And this guy Gould, I'm sure you're wondering, he was actually tipped off about the whole thing falling apart early. So he was able to walk away completely clean without really taking much damage. Now, if Gould and Fisk were chaos, John D. Rockefeller was the exact opposite. Rockefeller didn't thrive on chaos. He needed a system. So here's basically how standard oil grew. This is obviously John Rockefeller's company. If you've ever read the book Titan by Ron Chernow, it is fascinating and goes through like every little detail about who Rockefeller was. But here's basically what you need to know.

he would use secret rebate deals with the railroads and basically undercutting every single competitor's shipping costs and then he would just buy out whoever was left and so by 1890 standard oil controlled somewhere around like 90% of american oil refining 90%, but here's Rockefeller's real innovation and it's actually not oil in 1882 his lawyers invented something called the trust and this is important to explain because you've probably heard the word all the time. They're like, oh yeah, the trust, the family trust. And most people can't really tell you what it is. So here's how it works. Shareholders from a bunch of competing companies hand their stock over to a single board of trustees. And then that board coordinates prices and output across

the entire industry while every individual company still technically operates as its own independent business on paper. So basically one hand, one group of people is secretly controlling every other company behind the scenes. And that loophole is. is exactly what antitrust laws would eventually be built to close. And now, the one that we kind of mentioned in the intro, J.P. Morgan. Morgan didn't operate down in the mud with, you know, the rest of these other guys. I would say Rockfield kind of did. But some of the other guys, like obviously, Gould and Fisk, those guys were just like con artists.

He stood above it. So in 1901, he orchestrated the merger that created U.S. Steel, the world's first billion-dollar corporation. And what's wild is that that's actually not even his biggest move. His biggest move came in 1895. The U.S. Treasury's gold reserves are basically collapsing. They're going to zero. And the federal government is realizing that, you know, this is it. Like the government could collapse if these gold reserves go down. And they're realizing that, you know, this is a possibility of the first

peacetime default in all of American history. And of course, the president at the time, Grover Cleveland, he doesn't turn to Congress. He goes directly to J.P. Morgan. And Morgan's private banking syndicate hands over $65 million in gold using an obscure Civil War era statute that no one really was even thinking about. They all basically forgot it even existed and single-handedly bails out the United States federal government. It's crazy to think. A private citizen rescued the U.S. government from complete insolvency.

And if, I mean, if that's not power, I don't know what is. So think about the question we asked earlier. When one man owns, you know, part of a river, then when does he stop being a merchant and just starts becoming basically like an extension of the government? Well, right now in 1895, that's kind of the answer. Now, Carnegie shows up in this era too, which obviously he has a steel empire that was pretty untouchable, ruthlessly efficient, and had an entire vertical integration that really controlled his share of the market.

But we're going to hold off on his story until the end because it has its own name for its own specific reason. Now, one last thing before we move on, you've heard the phrase, the Gilded Age. And it actually comes from Mark Twain. He co-wrote a novel with that title in 18. Guilded, not golden, meaning gold on the surface hiding a cheaper material underneath. And that concept applies to almost everyone that we just talked about. Every person, every billionaire, every great business magnate I just talked about is kind of a beautiful gold flowering with a veneer

on top, with some rot underneath, some cheapness underneath. And there's a reason it defined the entire period. And it's about to apply to the entire government itself. So we know all the men. we understand how they made their money more or less. Now let's talk about how that money bought something that you probably don't even think is for sale, the U.S. government. And I don't want to start with like the whole rotten infrastructure because it's kind of abstract and not really the point. It's important, but not the point of this.

I want to start with one guy. The one guy who makes the entire section really makes sense. You probably never even heard of him. His name is Leland Stanford. Now here's what makes Stanford different from everyone else in the episode. He wasn't just rich. He was the governor of California. and the president of the Central Pacific Railroad.

Think about that. He's on both sides of the deal. So he's sitting in the governor's office and he's steering millions in state money towards his own railroad. Meanwhile, up in Washington, the Central Pacific and its partners walk away with roughly nine million acres of federal land

and tens of millions of dollars in government bonds. It's not corruption. Like, it's just the same hand writing both checks. Like, you can't be corrupted by your own interest. That's just like your own interests. it's bound to be corrupted. So that's Stanford in a nutshell. Our first robber baron who has a legit seat in the U.S. government. And while he doesn't inherently like make him corrupt, he's just kind of like funneling things to his own business, it does make it fishy and a little weird.

But this is just the beginning for him. Let's look at the U.S. Senate, for example. It's actually earned a nickname during the era. It was called the Millionaire's Club. And there's a structural reason that that nickname stuck. And it came from a loophole built right into the Constitution. So until in 1913, U.S. senators weren't elected by the public. They were chosen by state legislatures, which means if you wanted to buy a senator, you didn't even need to buy an electorate. You just needed to bribe or sponsor a few dozen state lawmakers. It was way cheaper and way easier. Then there was a scandal of credit mobilié. So in 1872, the scandal breaks. And it turns out that members of Congress have been quietly handed discount stock in a construction company that was massively

overbilling the Union Pacific Railroad. This is a railroad funded by federal subsidies because the guy that's run in the railroad is also in the government. So walk through the money trail for a second. The government funds the railroad. The railroad overpays a construction company and that construction company hands stock, as in literally like a cut of the profits basically, back to the very congressman who approved the funding in the first place.

You see how that works? It's a perfect circle going straight from the hands of the taxpayers directly back into the hands of the lawmakers. And Congress was basically profiting on both ends. But in 1896, the game evolves again, even further, because of a new man named Mark Hanna. Hannah is a wealthy industrialist. He runs William McKinley's presidential campaign, and he's really the first guy to run like a modern fundraising machine disguised as a presidential campaign.

He assesses corporations and banks directly for contributions, and he does it in exchange for policy favors down the line. You're probably hearing this being like, oh, that's just politics. Well, Hannah was this guy that kind of like invented it. Historians consider this the actual birth of the modern corporate-funded American election. And this era left behind something that we don't always get from history. There's pictures. There's actual visual proof of how people saw this and like what they were actually experiencing in real time.

And the most famous one is a political cartoon from 1889. It's called The Bosses of the Senate. And it shows this enormous, we'll put it up on the screen here so you can see. It's this enormous bloated money bag, each one labeled with a trust looming behind a row of tiny, cowering senators in the Senate chamber. And you don't really need that explained, right? You don't need it now. You definitely didn't need it then.

And another thread on this before we move on, because it's kind of a smaller story, but it is the seed of something massive that still plays a huge role today. It's lobbying. Lobbying, as we know it now, basically started with these railroads. Their move was pretty simple. You hand out free rail passes to sitting legislators. And it's like a little favor, just like a little courtesy. And that's fine, right?

And that is the entire origin. But that tiny little courtesy grew into a multi-billion dollar industry. And once again, we're going to come back to that number in a minute. And when we do, it's going to kind of tie everything in. And it's going to make everything else in this era look tiny by comparison. So every empire eventually has a body count, right? You can't really do an empire without some people getting hurt along. the way. And for this one, the moment really

arrives in 1892, at Carnegie's steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania. His second in command, a man named Henry Clay Frick, locks the workers out. They'd gone on strike over wage cuts. And Frick's response was basically, hey, bring in armed Pinkerton agents and

take the plant back by force. And it turns into a massive battle. There's gunfire on the riverbank. There's men dying on both sides. And Carnegie, well, Carnegie, for this entire thing, he's in Scotland. just conveniently, just kind of like posted up and like the highlands probably just

having some whiskey and just chilling. And think about that, right? Because it's not like a throwaway detail. It's like the whole point of the thing. Frick gave the order. Frick's hands are the ones that are actually getting dirty. He's the one that's dealing with actual bloodshed outside of his factory.

Carnegie, he was just chilling. So one man built the weapon and then the other man actually got to keep his reputation spotless. And that's not an accident. It's a feature. It's how power actually protects itself. And you can see this tactic happening over and over again throughout history. Now, only two years later, 1894, it happens again.

This is the Pullman strike. Railway workers walk out over wage cuts. And this time, it's the president of the United States who steps in. Grover Cleveland sends federal troops to break the strike. And the official justification was that it was obstructing mail delivery. Now, what's crazy about this whole thing, while all of it's happening, while soldiers are breaking into a strike of, you know, workers, basically, the actual trust, the ones that provoked the unrest in the first place, they were just untouched. And there's a reason for this, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.

It was written explicitly to break up monopolies, but in its earlier years, the courts used it far more often against labor unions than against the trust that was actually built for. Unions treated as illegal combinations in restraint of trade. So the very law that was meant to stop these monopolies and stop the barons, they got turned against the workers instead. So do you see like the through line with all this? Like did anyone have the nerve to stand up to against how these strings were being pulled against the corruption of this whole thing? Well yes, there was one woman in particular. Again, if you read Titan by Ron Cheneau by Rockefeller, Ida Tarbell is referenced all the time. And her story isn't really a policy story. It's

very personal. You see, her father had been financially crushed years earlier by Rockefeller's rebate scheme. Like, just completely wiped out. So when Tarbell, sits down to write her expose. This isn't abstract journalism for her, like writing from afar about an industry. It is literally her trying to reclaim her family name. Her father's ruin is, you know, an exposee in print. And that's what her life mission is at this point. So starting in 1902, she publishes a serialized investigation later collected as the history of the Standard Oil Company. And she does something that no one expected from what they call a muckraker. She uses Standard Oil's own internal records. It's

own testimony against itself. So the company's own paper trail was laid out for the entire country to read. And what's crazy about what Ida Tarbell did is that it worked. Public opinion turned in a way that no politician's speech was able to do, and it switched in just over a decade. And speaking of politicians, here's where they actually will come in a little bit. Teddy Roosevelt earns the nickname Trustbuster by taking on the Northern Securities Company. This is a railroad holding company, backed by J.P. Morgan himself, and he takes it all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 1904, he wins. But there's nuance that a lot of people miss about Roosevelt. He didn't actually hate all trusts. He drew a line. He said, you know, there were good trust that were efficient and fair and

good for the economy and good for the American people, and we had to leave those alone. And then there were bad trust, and those are the ones that existed just to gouge the public. You know, Roosevelt wasn't like some big ideologue. He wasn't like, I think sometimes people try to frame him for their side. He was a sorter. And he was a sorter. And he was. was pretty pragmatic about it. Now, here's a fact that surprises a lot of people. William Howard Taft, Roosevelt's forgettable successor, big fat guy, had a custom bathtub. Well, this is kind of a president that no one really remembers, but Taft actually busted way more trust in one term than Roosevelt did in nearly eight years, including the big one in 1911. The Supreme Court orders the

breakup of standard oil itself. This is massive. Woodrow Wilson ends up finishing the job on paper through the Clayton Antitrust Act and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, both in 1914. And standing behind a lot of that thinking is a man named Lewis Brandeis. And he actually coins the phrase worth remembering,

the curse of bigness. His whole argument was that concentrated power is dangerous to democracy. Whether or not it's efficient, whether or not it's good, it is just dangerous when it gets this concentrated. So by 1911 on paper, it looked like the good guys were winning.

But, of course, the Senate wants to change that. because the trusts are getting broken up one by one, and Standard Oil, the biggest of all of them, is actually dead, except this is a caveat. Standard Oil gets broken up in 1911. 34 separate companies carved out of one massive empire, but Rockefeller keeps his shares in every single company.

Now, here's what no one expects. The market looks at these 34 pieces now free of all the political risk, all the antitrust heat, and actually prices them higher. and like individually they're they're bigger like the sum is smaller than the pieces so now the whole company is worth more as fragments so within a year Rockefeller's net worth actually goes up because of the trust busting think about that the government dismantles his monopoly and it makes him richer some estimates put his peak fortune adjusted for inflation somewhere between 400 and 600 billion

dollars in today's money which would make him by a wide margin like one of the richest people who ever lived. I mean, I guess like Elon is now close, but for, I mean, 100 years, like, no one was even touching him. The breakup didn't, like, destroy his fortune. It just diversified his equities. So those 34, like, baby standards, as they called them, like the pieces of standard oil, they grew up, and you probably know their names, Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Marathon. And in 1999, in a twist that is, like, so funny, Exxon and Mobile just merged back together. Right? Like, The companies that were trust busted that were now separate little fragments, they just joined back up again, you know, some 70, 80 years later. Like the river finds its way back to its owner.

Now, before we go further, I want to actually give both sides of this a fair fight, not some like, you know, some people disagree, but like an actual case. So Carnegie wrote an essay in 1889 called The Gospel of Wealth. And it's really interesting to hear his own words. And his argument is basically this. The rich have a moral duty to give their fortunes away while they are still alive. for the public good. And to his credit, he actually put his money where his mouth was. I mean, over 2,500 public libraries funded out of his own pocket. Rockefeller, the same way, poured a ton of money into medical research. He even founded the University of Chicago. A ton of HBCU colleges,

like Spelman, was founded by Rockefeller, actually named after his wife, SETI Spelman. And the strongest version of the defense comes from historian Burton Folsom in a book called The Myth of the Robber Barons. And his argument in defense of the robber barons as these captains of industry is that there's a difference between market entrepreneurs who build value through actual competition and innovation and political entrepreneurs who just basically leaned on government favors and used loopholes to get rich. Folsom's case is that men like Rockefeller earned it and they were really smart and they worked really hard and through efficiency they grew these massive empires, not through corruption. But of course, critics push back and their argument is that, hey, the philanthropy, convenient. shows up after the monopolistic damage is already done to the economy. So it's not generosity. It's like a PR cleanup.

It's just a reputational repair on a scale that, you know, you can't even really imagine because they have so much money. And honestly, I don't think you really have to like pick a side here. I think both are true. Now, the bigger picture is underneath all of this. And you can't really ignore it. Every single time regulation finally caught up to one version of power, the power just changes shape.

So AT&T, for example, becomes a regulated monopoly instead of a broken one. Holding companies, conglomerates, new legal structure, same underlying logic. You have the same choke point that these people are getting rich on. It's just a different river. Fellows, this episode is sponsored by Blue Chew. Look, life is about preparation. You got to prepare for a camping trip, for your job, for a podcast. And you got to prepare it for all of the things happening in your life.

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Right now, if you buy two months of Blue Chew Gold, you're going to get the third month free with the promo code Gagnon. That's J-G-N-O-N-N. You're also going to get an additional 10% off plus free overnight shipping on your very first order when you visit Bluatu.com. Use the promo code Gagnon, and you can check out more details and important safety information. Thanks so much, Blu, let's get back to the show. So that brings us to today. Where is the river now? Where are the choke points on these, you know, these rivers? Where are the tolls? And I'm not going to name every name because, you know, you don't really need me to. You can imagine, right? There are major tech antitrust case that are moving through the federal courts right now. And the playbook here looks identical to standard oil. Different substance. Instead of oil pipelines, it's search results and app stores and advertising. But the same question still applies. Who controls the choke point that everyone else has to pass through? are actually starting to call this a second gilded age. Defenders are pushing back and they argue that comparing a search engine to 19th century oil trusts misunderstand the eras. But, you know, today's

giants built something that didn't exist before them in a way that Rockefeller never really had to. And both the arguments, I think, deserve time. So I'm going to try to give them both to you and let you decide. But here's number one, before we move on. And earlier, I promised that we would come back to this. Modern federal lobbying spending. So this is like all the money. that's used by corporations for, you know, basically getting favors in politics. It's tracked through official disclosure filings and it runs into the billions of dollars every single year. And even adjusted for inflation, even being generous to the Gilded Age, that number dwarfs anything a 19th century lobbyist could even imagine with like a handful of free rail passes.

I mean, the tools are fundamentally different. The size of the toll on the river, it didn't change. It didn't get smaller. Just the river is now digital. So data. attention infrastructure. But again, the same question is still here. Who owns this choke point? So, where the robber barons stopped? Kind of. Standard oil got broken up. The Senate got reformed. All these antitrust laws they exist because of exactly the men we just spent the last, you know, 30 minutes talking about. But also, not really. Because every generation builds its own toll booths on a different river. Every generation eventually notices and then the fight between concentrated power and everyone else never actually ends.

It just, again, changes industries, changes technology, change the name on the door switches around. But all the guys we looked at earlier, like Carnegie, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, these guys who laid the foundations for the modern robber baron in America, well, they're not gone, and they're not going to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Even though we can honestly say, yeah, every generation will have people with concentrated power, it doesn't mean that it's not potentially dangerous. And that doesn't mean we should just ignore it and let it happen. So we have to keep on looking at, these same patterns in history and keep on asking these questions, how much power can one private citizen have before they stop just being a citizen like you and me and they start becoming a rival

government inside the same country? Like you just watch that line get crossed again and published and then recrossed again across nearly a century of American history and is still going on right now. So I'm not going to tell you who's doing it necessarily because honestly by this point I don't really think you need me to, but you know the names. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief summary of the robber barons in American history. It's a fascinating topic, right? Because these robber barons at the time, again, it's even funny because growing up, I would use the term robber baron, like in school. And I never considered it a pejorative. Like, it's so funny because they would just say, yeah, robber barons. And I'd be like, yeah, I almost thought like the Red Baron.

I was like, Red Baron's cool. So I was like, these guys aren't that bad, you know? But like, yeah, They just invented, I almost don't even, like, I don't even criticize Rockefeller. Like, he was just doing capitalism. You know what I'm saying? Like, what? There were less rules. There was less like, he just was playing the game. Like, you almost can't fault him because by all standards, he seemed like a pretty nice guy.

Like, the issue with Rockefeller, don't be wrong. Like, I don't think it's on him. It's kind of just on the system. He built a massive company. He would go into other industries. Like, I think he was in Cincinnati, if I'm not mistaken. And then he would go to like Cleveland. He would go to like, you know, some place in Pennsylvania and be like, hey, you have an oil

refinery. Well, I'm going to give away oil for free. You can't like, and then I'm just going to just drive you into the ground. And then you can sell to me or go bankrupt. It's your choice. And then they would all just be like, fine, I'll sell to you. That's what happened to Ida Tarbell and her daddy. So she was just like, fine, I'll give you all, I'll give you my company.

And then they would sell. These people would make pretty good money, a couple mill. They lived the rest of their life happy. and then Rockefeller just built a massive empire. Is it his fault for playing the game? It's just kind of the game. It's really the government's fault for not being like, hey, don't do that.

You know what I mean? Like, so yeah, you can put it on them for being, like, Rockfiller in particular, because I know the most about him, he wasn't really like, like, yeah, he would kind of do schemes and he would kind of use like these kind of backdoor little things, but he wasn't like going out of his way

to defraud people. He was just ruthless in his business, but also like a devout Christian was also like built. building colleges, trying to, like, give his money away. So it's a complicated case of, like, he was just doing what capitalism does. And it's ultimately on the government to try to censor and, like, control it as best they can and not let these things get out of control.

Yeah, I guess they didn't expect one person to be able to, like, amass the power also. Like, when you build rules to a game, which, like, I guess capitalism and government creating is a game, also, that deforestation is crazy. Are you getting some deforestation right now? We're getting a little bit of it. All right. Well, maybe we can edit out some of the deforestation. Who knows?

But yeah, when you're making the rules of a game, like, which capitalism is or, like, government making and all of these things. Like, at some point, it is game theory. You sometimes forget that, like, people will break the rules for the game or, like, find loopholes and exploits in the game. That's the thing. Any type of rule comes in after the rules been broken.

Yeah. So all these antitrust laws, I don't know how you could foresee them. Yeah. Like, I don't know if you're, like, developing, like, the economic code in the early 1800s, and you're like, oh, people are able to kind of, like, trade across the entire. country really quickly.

Like, it's hard to even imagine. It's hard to imagine what the future will look like for us. And then someone does it. And then all of a sudden you're like, whoa, hold on. You can't do that. And they're like, it's not on the rules. Yeah. It's like, I imagine like sports had this where it was like,

like, I'm sure in basketball, like they had to make a rule where like you couldn't do something. Yeah. Because they were like, no, no one can do that. And then some freak athlete came along and did something no one could imagine. Dunking was like a big example of this. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, there's a bunch of different. Yellow cards and like sports and soccer. Right, exactly. We were just talking about that. They were like, oh yeah, like you're not going to kick someone in the face. And then someone kick someone in the face. One game isn't going to create actual like bedlam and chaos on the field. And then they make yellows and reds.

And then there's a massive riot in a World Cup. And they're like, all right, well, we got to have a code here. Yeah. So I'm almost like kind of ambivalent to the robber barons. Yeah, I don't know. Like, is the aggregation of wealth terrible for America? Yeah. Is like consolidating all the power to one private citizens' hands?

and they're able to do anything they want. You've got to hope that they're a good guy. Yeah. Not great. Yeah. But it's like, it's just them playing the game. Yeah, it was a systemic issue. It's a systemic end point of capitalism in a funny way.

You know what I mean? Like, I'm not mad of LeBron James. We're having all the points. Yeah. Now imagine those points gave them like the ability to Star Wars. Yeah. Now all of a sudden I'd be a little bit like, whoa. But it's also like, no, he's just playing basketball better than anyone.

Yeah. There's many books and many different things to read about this. But if you're overwhelmed by books or any of that. kind of stuff. There's a great show on Amazon Prime called Titans, The Rise of Wall Street. You tell me about this. I got to watch that. It's awesome. It's equal parts like documentary and equal parts like recreation of what's happening. So it'll be like a guy who voices over like and then this happened. And then like guys in old timey suits act out certain scenes. And of course, parts are dramatized and it's shortened down and whatever. But I find it to be very fun.

Yeah. And a great example. And it goes all the way into the 80s. So it's, it's the history of Wall Street and it's just so happens the first few episodes or of course like Morgan and and you know I think through probably the fifth episode you get to like the 20s yeah it's just it's easy for people to like just bag on these people be like oh do rock filler's a dummy he's a scumbag I'm like sort of yeah I don't know is that is this coming across I don't want to seem like I'm I'm just you know glazing the I'm not shilling the the standard oil company but it's like he played the game, the rules had to catch up, and now we're in a position where the rules got to catch up again. If we're facing another massive monopoly, which, I mean, there's plenty in America

that aren't called monopolies, but function as monopolies. Like, even industries you don't think about. Like pistachios, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. It's like controlled by like two companies. Well, we just had this issue with like the global market of food. There was this breakout of like diarrhea causing bacteria. And they found out that like the same farms, that people are buying from at like big box stores, Walmart or whatever that might be, are also the same places they're selling to like quote unquote boutique stores, whole foods or whatever. And just white labeling,

the different name. But it's all coming from like four facilities. Yeah. And it just goes to show that like, yeah, like at most times under like a capitalist system, it will always sort of, uh,

uh, it's, it aggregates. It just, it monopolizes. Yeah. Which is like capitalism is, a lot of great things.

Yeah. But I think you got to be realistic that there's some bad things and one of those is it's prone to monopolization. Yeah, you need to have a strong government to go against it. Yeah, it concentrates. But now what happens when you're,

you know, got a little Senate seat and all of a sudden you're getting a kickback from one of the monopolies? If I'm in that Senate seat, you're probably just like, hey, this is a nice monopoly. These guys are great. They set my kid to college.

They got me a new house. I got a boat. Yeah, if Taylor Farms has thrown you money. This episode should be sponsored by Taylor Farms. One of the best farms in America. It's a next car. I think.

One of the best farms in America and Mexico. That's how amazing they are. They're multinational. That's the best kind of company to have. You want a company that's just in one country? No, I want a company in every country. Yeah. That's fire.

And on top of that, you eat a little bit of Taylor Farms. What is it? Lettuce. Yeah. Why do you eat lettuce? To lose weight. And what happens if you get explosive diarrhea? Dude, you're losing a lot of weight.

Thin is a rail, baby. That's what I'm saying. Taylor Farm is doing what no one else is doing, allegedly. I don't even know if that's true. Don't sue me. But it's just an interesting little ripple, right? I think we've got to be pragmatic and realistic. Things are not all black and they're not all white.

Everything's kind of gray. And these robber bands are kind of the same case. Hey, let them innovate, let them push the limits. And then have a strong government that's able to trust bust and get him out of here. Like old Tafts. I wonder if he got maligned by the history books because he was trust busting. Yeah, no one really hears about him. They were like, oh, yeah.

McGrath Hill. They were like, yeah, this guy was so fat. Think about how fat this guy was. And they're like, didn't he, wasn't he like super against monopolies? They're like, this, no, dude. This guy was the fastest guy ever. This guy sucked him in Avali, dude. He lost all the time.

Yeah, this guy was terrible. Dude, this guy, he tried to break in McDonald's because he loved it so much. I don't know. I'm kind of losing the bit here. But you got my point. What do you guys think? Am I, am I shilling?

Or am I just a lib? I don't even know what my take is at this point. Like, I don't even know where I land. But where do you guys land? Drop a comment, YouTube, Spotify. I read all of them, even if I don't respond to them. Someone else will and it'll be productive conversation. And just please keep it civil.

Like I always said, we have a history of campus, It's a small show. It's a little enclave on the internet where me and all my friends talk about stuff and I don't want it to be gross and mean. So just be a normal human being and try to have a polite conversation, please, for the love of all that is good. Also, if you like religious content, great news, we have Religion Camp. You can check that out in the description. If you like crazy deep dives, conspiracies, mysteries, well, great news. We have Camp Gagnon. I'm saying it correctly from now on. That's the main channel where I talk with people way smarter than me, thank goodness, and also do deep dives all on my own, just like this,

but on more esoteric topics. Furthermore, we have a Secret Society. Yes, it is very secretive. You're going to get every episode of this show ad-free. You're also going to get monthly zooms with me and the rest of the homies. You're also going to get episodes that never go out to the public and early releases of episodes and merch discounts. I mean, you're basically just going to become a friend of mine

and you'll have all the things that I give to Miles. Now, the secret society is not free. It's about the price of a cup of coffee every single month. And you can find it at patreon.com slash campgagnon. Now, if you just like to rock with a history vibe, well, great news. We do this episode every single week, so make sure you subscribe. And I will see you in the future to talk about the past. God bless you all.

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